How is Brexit going to affect your personal finances? Immediately after the vote to leave the pound, stock market, bonds and pension values all fell. Economists spoke of the country sliding or plunging into recession, interest rates rising or falling and tax increasing or decreasing. Political analysts announced we would be out of the EU within two years, others said…
More…
Opportunity: Communal living spaces
Communal or co-living, whereby tenants accept smaller living/sleeping areas in exchange for much larger communal spaces and an emphasis on social interaction, is, possibly, the fastest growing area of property investment. The reason why it is expanding so quickly is because it offers a solution to the shortage of affordable housing for young people in the world’s major cities. Another…
More…
Spread Betting
Huge profits of 100%, 200%, 300% or more in a matter of days. Minimal capital investment. No tax to pay on gains. The benefits of spread betting are trumpeted far and wide by the companies offering to take your money. What they play down, of course, is the risk. And yet, if you approach this opportunity as a gamble and…
More…
Equity or property?
Although our editorial policy might be considered contrarian, in so far as we prefer alternative to conventional investment, we never lose sight of the relative returns offered by each. In particular, the stock market has always provided better long term returns than property. Below we explain by how much and in what circumstances. Barclays recently published an Equity Gilt Study…
More…
Keep an eye on fund charges
If you invest in managed funds (such as unit trusts) your main concern is likely to be the overall performance of your investment. However, the unit price is only half the story. The charges that your fund managers levy will have a significant impact on your returns. Here is a quick summary of the charges that a typical fund will…
More…
Here Be Dragons
Nicholas Adams, a seasoned property investor based in the UK, offers some tax saving tips I am not really a J R Tolkien fan but there is a quotation from The Hobbit that often comes to mind when I am considering different ways in which to reduce the cost of property tax: ‘It does not do to leave a dragon…
More…
A 10-year tax holiday and no IHT
Aliyah (from the Hebrew meaning ‘ascent’) is the immigration of Jews from the diaspora to the Land of Israel. Also defined as ‘the act of going up’—that is, towards Jerusalem—‘making Aliyah’ by moving to the Land of Israel is one of the most basic tenets of Zionism. The State of Israel’s Law of Return gives Jews and their descendants automatic…
More…
Not worth your weight in gold
HMRC has issued a warning to companies paying their staff in gold bars as a way of reducing tax liability. Such schemes (referred to as ‘disguised remuneration’ schemes) depend on the employee paying the value of the gold to a trust at some point in the future and make the erroneous assumption that this obligation makes the initial receipt of…
More…
Staff tax evasion must be reported
UK and foreign companies will become criminally liable for failing to stop their staff facilitating tax evasion if new government proposals are adopted. ‘The criminal law currently renders corporations that refrain from implementing good corporate governance and strong reporting procedures hard to prosecute, and offers no incentive to invest in such procedures,’ the government said in a consultation paper. The…
More…